The Department of Pali and Buddhist Studies at Savitribai Phule Pune University (SPPU) in Pune, India, has published a Dictionary of Buddhist Terms, a multilingual dictionary with Pali headwords as the basis. The dictionary gives translations into English, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, all in Roman script, along with their respective textual attestations for scholars of comparative Buddhist studies.
The Indian Express newspaper reported with the release of the dictionary’s third fascicle on 9 March that the Dictionary of Buddhist Terms would eventually grow into a volume of 50 fascicles. The first and second fascicles were published last year. The publishers also plan to add Chinese-language definitions, which, they say, will make the Dictionary of Buddhist Terms the only multilingual dictionary of its kind.
“We will be soon adding the Chinese language in the project and are in search of a suitable scholar to collaborate,” said Mahesh Deokar, professor and head of the Department of Pali and Buddhist Studies. “Besides, we are considering having this dictionary in Devanagiri and Tibetan scripts.” (The Indian Express)
Prof. Deokar, along with Dr. Lata Deokar, Snehal Kondhalkar and Prof. Maheshwar Singh Negi, started the Dictionary of Buddhist Terms project two years ago. The linguists stated that the dictionary would eventually be expanded to encompass the entire Pali alphabet.
Each fascicle contains 100 words, with three fascicles published so far containing a total of 300 words beginning with the letter “A.” In the upcoming fascicle, at least 300 more words will be added.
“The book aims to simultaneously be used in tracing the changing meanings of Buddhist terminologies across space and time,” SPPU said in a statement. “Besides, it may reveal both the common and unique vocabularies used in Pali and Sanskrit Buddhist traditions.” (The Indian Express)
The Dictionary of Buddhist Terms is intended to serve as a guide for academics conducting comparative studies on various Buddhist traditions, using Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan as the primary languages.
SPPU vice-chancellor Prof. Nitin Karmalkar, who has worked extensively in Ladakh and has interacted with Buddhist monks for surveys and research, said that he believed that the dictionary had the potential to bring to the attention of scholars literary works in the Tibetan language that are currently hidden within the many monasteries in Ladakh.
Prof. Prasad Joshi, vice-chancellor of Deccan College and a Sanskrit scholar, noted that the Dictionary of Buddhist Terms project is making significant contributions to the field of lexicography. For some years, Prof. Joshi has also been working to compile a Sanskrit dictionary.
“World over, there are not many ongoing lexicography projects, and dictionary compilation is a long-drawn process. We need to train more lexicographers and stop this art from dying out,” said Prof. Joshi. He added that a digital edition of the Dictionary of Buddhist Terms would be made available to researchers around the world. (The Indian Express)
Deshana, an Institute of Buddhist and Allied Studies, and the Khyentse Foundation launched this multilingual dictionary project in June 2020.
The Department of Pali and Buddhist Studies, then known as the Department of Pali, was established in July 2006. Prior to its establishment, courses in Pali and Buddhist Studies were taught in the Department of Sanskrit and Prakrit Languages. The Department of Pali and Buddhist Studies is the only location under the jurisdiction of SPPU where students can study Buddhist literature in Pali, Sanskrit, and Tibetan, from basic to advance levels.
Read more
Department of Pali and Buddhist Studies (SPPU)
SPPU’s dictionary to have 50 fascicles; Chinese to be added (The Indian Express)
SPPU to release multi-lingual dictionary for comparative Buddhist studies Wednesday (The Indian Express)
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New state-of-the-art system offers enterprise customers and translation professionals with advanced customization options for multi-domain, multi-dialect, multi-genre translations, which boost accuracy and further accelerate translation and localization workflows.
MCLEAN, Va., April 14, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- AppTek, a leader in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) for Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Neural Machine Translation (NMT), Natural Language Processing / Understanding (NLP/U) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) technologies, today announced the release of its new neural machine translation system that incorporates metadata as inputs used to customize the MT output and empower localization professionals with more accurate user-influenced machine translations. Additionally, the company expanded its core machine translation platform to support hundreds of language and dialect pairs.
AppTek's new meta-aware NMT system is changing the paradigm of how professional translators work with machine translation output. Up until today, most off-the-shelf MT systems have functioned inside a "black box" where source language text is formulated into text of a target language with no or limited awareness of the surrounding context or the domain or topic of the source text, and with limited control of the resulting output. Traditionally, enterprises would need to train, deploy and maintain multiple MT systems to account for translation tasks that differ in aspects such as language, dialect, domain, topic, and more, at the risk of high deployment costs and overfitting models.
With AppTek's new metadata informed NMT platform, enterprise customers can now access a single NMT system with multi-domain, multi-genre, multi-dialect content which increases the quality and adaptability of the system. By feeding additional metadata into the system, they gain more control of the MT output and can enable translators to simply "flip the switch" to the desired customized translation through relevant functionality in the user interface of the editing tools professionals work with.
Examples of MT output customization achieved with using additional metadata include:
Style - switch between formal and informal styles, such as that between a telenovela and a documentary, and get a translation with an appropriate politeness register depending on speaker status and relationships;
Length Control for Automatic Dubbing and Subtitling Tasks – generate shorter or longer translations with minimal information loss or distortion for tasks with hard length constraints;
Speaker Gender – toggle to the correct speaker gender, which influences inflections for certain parts of speech, especially in morphologically rich languages such as Czech;
Domain – adapt to the genre of the text, such as news programs, patents, talk shows, etc. to increase overall accuracy and use of in-domain, relevant translations of ambiguous words at the document level;
Extended Context – optionally make the system consider neighboring sentences within a document when translating a particular sentence so that ambiguity of, for example, pronoun translation can be resolved.
Glossary – account for official or mandatory translations which the system may otherwise translate differently; and,
Language Variety - account for multiple languages and dialects within a single system, as well as handling mixed-language content.
"By incorporating metadata to influence the MT output we are able to inject some 'world knowledge' into our platform," said Evgeny Matusov, AppTek's Lead Science Architect for Neural Machine Translation. "This improves the overall quality and adaptability of the system output and can be accomplished within a single multi-purpose system designed to reduce environmental footprint and cost."
AppTek's metadata-informed MT technology is now available for translation from English to selected European languages and their varieties, with more language pairs coming soon. The system can be customized and adapted to the needs of enterprise customers by utilizing existing parallel domain-specific translation corpora found inside company archives.
"As the demand for content localization continues to skyrocket, enterprises need to continue to innovate and find new ways to further accelerate production workflows," said Kyle Maddock, SVP Marketing at AppTek. "Our metadata-informed MT system has been specifically designed with translation professionals in mind, by providing them with more control over the MT output which can further speed up the localization process."
In addition to its metadata-informed NMT system, AppTek has also expanded its core MT platform to cover an extensive list of languages and dialects including the addition of Indic and Slavic languages. It now supports Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic (multi-dialect), Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Belorussian, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (multi-dialect), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, English (multi-dialect), Estonian, Farsi, Finnish, French (multi-dialect), Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Marathi, Mongolian, Norwegian, Pashto, Polish, Portuguese (multi-dialect), Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish (multi-dialect), Swedish, Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Tigrinya, Thai, Turkish, Turkmen, Ukrainian, Urdu and Uzbek.
For more information, visit www.apptek.com.
About AppTek AppTek is a global leader in artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies for automatic speech recognition (ASR), neural machine translation (NMT), natural language processing/understanding (NLP/U) and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies. The AppTek platform delivers industry-leading, real-time streaming and batch technology solutions in the cloud or on-premises for organizations across a breadth of global markets such as media and entertainment, call centers, government, enterprise business, and more. Built by scientists and research engineers who are recognized among the best in the world, AppTek's multidimensional 4D for HLT (human language technology) solutions with slice and dice methodology covering hundreds of languages/dialects, domains, channels and demographics drive high impact results with speed and precision. For more information, please visit http://www.apptek.com.
Media Contact: Kyle Maddock
202-413-8654
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Slator’s very own Anna Wyndham joins the pod to share key insights from our flagship Slator 2022 Language Industry Market Report.
Totalling 100 pages, the report covers language industry growth, the LSP competitive landscape, core language industry technologies, and market outlook. Anna starts off by breaking down market size by vertical, geographic region, and buyer intention. She also touches on spotlight topics, such as remote interpreting, media localization, and expert-in-the-loop.
Anna reviews frontier language technologies, with speech-to-speech translation, synthetically dubbed media, and synthetically generated content marketing having the potential to disrupt and expand the market. Florian gives his outlook on the market and projected growth to 2026 based on conservative, base, and optimistic growth scenarios.
Next up, Florian and Esther discuss the language industry news of the week, which saw Lilt raise USD 55m in series C funding led by Four Rivers. The tech-enabled LSP plans to update its MT system to support high-volume use cases and expand features for fully automatic workflows.
Also in the US, on-demand healthcare interpreting platform, Jeenie, announced a USD 9.3m series A funding round led by Transformation Capital. Jeenie’s MRR is currently growing at 25% monthly, and the round valued the company at approximately USD 34m.
Anthony Burgess, author of A Clockwork Orange, spoke several languages, from Spanish to Malay, Italian to Maltese, with Urdu puns and Hindi idiom also peppering his books. Even Nadsat, the language he coined for his citric classic, was a hybrid of Russian, Arabic and Cockney slang.
Yet English was his beloved monster, his cradle tongue limber in 33 novels, ten non-fiction works and countless articles. I remember reading Earthly Powers (Hutchison, 1980), all 678 pages when Eurailing, reeling at the surplus of alien words – from odalisque to baldachin. Anthony Burgess spoke English like Beethoven played piano.
Never-ending raggedness – how I love that phrase. It’s why I cherish English and all her nuances.
Which is why Robert Burchfield, the Oxford Dictionary’s chief editor during the 1970s, was sweating bullets. An expat Kiwi, Burchfield had devoted 15 years to updating the original Oxford, issuing some 3000 pages via four supplement volumes, from 1972 to 1986, fretting over how Burgess – the era’s darling linguist – would respond as critic.
He didn’t need to worry. Burgess gushed in his review, applauding the Oxford gnomes for mining the zeitgeist. New words teemed the glossary, across electronics (bar code, dot matrix) and society (herstory, yuppie), food (chocoholic, vegeburger) and politics (mission statement, charm offensive). Burchfield was so relieved he wrote to Burgess in 1986:
“You have a perfect awareness of the never-ending raggedness, stretching away into darkness, of our language at the perimeter of what we can manage to put in our largest dictionaries.”
Never-ending raggedness – how I love that phrase. It’s why I cherish English and all her nuances, the gaps and imprecisions, her muddied ancestry and restless spirit, the exotica and esoterica. How can something so alluvial be so robust? I adore how alchemists like Burgess can turn her ore into awe, while auditors like Burchfield have the right bravado to measure her infinity.
Transputor, lookism, slumpflation – not every supplement entry qualified for the future. But most did. In his own book, Unlocking The English Language (Faber, 1989), Burchfield shares the dilemmas (Pythonesque – yes, but Ibsenity – no), the suffix overload (essayette, poolathon), the grammar pickles and trademark debates.
The correspondences too, from thanking Burgess to helping producers of Agatha Christie’s play, The Mousetrap. Or was it The Mouse-Trap? Or The Mouse Trap? (“Dear Sir, please advise.“) One word, no hyphen, decreed the chief editor, popping his response into the post: another day tidying the endless raggedness.
Al Grassby also appears in Burchall’s memoir. In 1976, as Australia’s commissioner for community relations, Grassby demanded the withdrawal of the Australian Pocket Oxford, due to its inclusion of wog, wop and dago. The argument sat heavily with Burchfield, whose own tomes faced equal flak for definitions of Pakistan or Palestinian. Correction slips could only cover so many ideological slips. Such disputes embody the dictionary paradox, where any lexicon as much a parrot of how people use language as an authority.
Speaking of parrots, Julian Barnes once worked at the Oxford, the eventual author of Flaubert’s Parrot, who quit the gig after three years, owing to a single word. As Barnes recollected: “You know [this word] exists but after three weeks of continuous searching there is still no trace: Germy. It is as if germy had vanished into thin air…”
Search engines and online archives would later accelerate any verbal quest, the same resources set to outdate much of Burchfield’s labour. Only last month the Oxford announced the inclusion of burner phone and vaxxed, demisexual and trigger warning; the raggedness never rests. No matter how diligently the lexicographers hoard, English will continue shape-shifting like bezoomy (Nadsat for crazy). Not a word, not yet – but just wait.
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David Astle is the crossword compiler and Wordplay columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. He is a broadcaster on ABC Radio Melbourne.
Que-quiere-decir.com develops a Spanish language platform where people can learn, search, find meaning, translations, word origins, and more with this Spanish Online Dictionary Service.
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Contact Details
Company Name: Que-quiere-decir
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SOURCE: Que-quiere-decir
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PITTSFIELD — 1Berkshire has begun a project to collect materials and resources in the Berkshires focused on entrepreneurial resources and guidance and having them translated into Spanish.
This effort, in partnership with the Berkshire Immigrant Center and Berkshire Language Management, aims to help increase the accessibility of key information, resources and marketing materials for Spanish-speaking businesses and entrepreneurs in the region.
Over the next few months, 1Berkshire will work with its collaborative partners and fellow entrepreneurial support programs in the Berkshires to pull together the most critical resources to be translated. From there, translation experts from the Berkshire Immigrant Center and Berkshire Language Management will help to get the documents and audio translated into at least Spanish, and potentially additional languages as capacity allows.
Individuals, business and entrepreneurial support partners in the region with information or thoughts on this endeavor can contact the economic development team at economicdev@1berkshire.com.
Haruki Murakami’s fifth book, Norwegian Wood, was a sensation in Japan when it was first released in 1987. Despite its success, it wasn’t widely available in English until 2000. The gap between its publication and its popular translation is surprising in hindsight, but few people outside the author’s home country had heard of him until the later English releases of some of his other works. Reportedly, American publishers initially assumed that Norwegian Wood wouldn’t appeal to a wide audience. Once it finally appeared in the Anglophone world, it was a hit all over again, and it ended up selling millions of copies globally.
This is just one example of a well-known phenomenon: Some books and authors are widely read abroad, but find popularity in American markets only decades later. Benjamin Moser’s 2009 biography of the Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, Why This World, helped prompt a sensitive, popular English retranslation project of her works. Even though Abdulrazak Gurnah writes primarily in English, the author was largely unknown to the American public before winning the Nobel Prize in Literature last October, though he was short-listed for the Booker Prize in 1994 and has published 10 novels. Now the American publisher Riverhead Books has rushed to acquire some of Gurnah’s new and older titles, such as Desertion (2005) and By the Sea (2001); his recent novel Afterlives will be published in the United States just two years after its initial release. Better late than never.
Saying that a foreign author has been “discovered” when their work is finally translated into English or released in the U.S. is a marketing trope—one that usually ignores how prominent, prolific, or acclaimed a writer is in their own right. It also highlights the publishing industry’s marginalization of authors who write in other languages, beyond established stars such as Elena Ferrante or Karl Ove Knausgård. Overall, new releases of books in translation remain rarer than they should be.
The nine titles presented below are merely some of the many books that have gone on to live a second life of sorts in English translation after their initial prominence or accomplishment in another language. These late-blooming editions owe much to the attentive passion of translators and publishers—but, as I was reminded in researching this article, just as much to luck.
Everyman’s Library
The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street, by Naguib Mahfouz (translated by William Maynard Hutchins, Olive E. Kenny, Lorne M. Kenny, and Angele Botros Samaan)
We probably have Mahfouz’s 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature—the first won by an Egyptian or an Arab—to thank for bringing the writer’s Cairo Trilogy to English-speaking audiences. First released in full in Arabic in 1957, then translated to English from 1990 to 1992, the three-part novel follows three generations of the al-Jawad family during the turbulent rise of Egypt’s national identity, beginning with the years before the fall of the Ottoman empire. Their house’s architecture is an allegory for their social relations; its different floors either welcome or are out of bounds for some members of the family (especially the women). This hierarchy unfolds under the rhythms of sharing meals and discussing politics, including the bubbling ideologies that sometimes spark revolutions. Mahfouz focuses on Amina, the matriarch, as a microcosm for decades of change. In Sugar Street, the third book, the women stick together around the warmth of a brazier on a cold January day, and though the ritual of the family coffee hour continues, it’s not quite the same after the tumult of past years: Some chairs remain stubbornly empty.
Europa Editions
Breasts and Eggs, by Mieko Kawakami (translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd)
How much does a body govern a woman’s existence? In Breasts and Eggs, Kawakami examines womanhood, along with the self-scrutiny and outside judgment it inspires. Three working-class women reunite in Tokyo: Makiko, mother to an almost-teenage daughter, Midoriko, visits her younger sister and Midoriko’s aunt, Natsuko, an asexual, unmarried 30-year-old who will later struggle with childlessness and determining her status in society. They face inner torments. Natsuko navigates the pain of her family’s past and current hardships. An aging and insecure Makiko wants a breast augmentation. Midoriko, who has taken refuge in her diary, no longer speaks, overwhelmed by the emotional burden of adolescence. Kawakami conveys the pain of affliction, sisterhood, sacrifice, and intergenerational tensions with poignant intimacy in the first part of the book, captured in seemingly anodyne remarks. “What can you make with just eggs?” one character asks, inspecting the fridge. A lot, it turns out. Expanded from a 2008 novella to a full-length, two-part novel published in English in 2020, Breasts and Eggs slows in pace when Natsuko’s focus shifts from mediating conflict between her sister and niece to inspecting her own repressed dreams. This, understandably, takes more effort and determination.
Radiance and Sunrise, by Lope K. Santos (translated by Danton Remoto)
The initially serialized Radiance and Sunrise first appeared in book form in 1906, translated into English for a modern readership in 2021. Santos, an eminent author, linguist, governor, and senator of the Philippines, wrote the novel influenced by living through the Philippine-American War while espousing the bustling leftist ideologies of the time; he was involved in the country’s first modern trade-union federation, Unión Obrera Democrática Filipina. In this love story that also reads like a political tract, two friends, Delfin and Felipe, share the ebbs and flows of everyday life. The former is a socialist, the latter an anarchist. Their ideas don’t always align, and they struggle to excise capitalism from their lives, especially when it complicates their relationships; Delfin loves Meni, the daughter of a wealthy man, and Felipe loves his father, a landlord. Both have hard choices to make. The book, which is considered a classic in Tagalog literature, exquisitely captures the zeitgeist of the time: the dream that societies would better provide for their people—one still not quite achieved, both in the Philippines and elsewhere.
Picador
The Copenhagen Trilogy: Childhood, Youth, Dependency, by Tove Ditlevsen (translated by Tiina Nunnally and Michael Favala Goldman)
“Childhood is long and narrow like a coffin, and you can’t get out of it on your own,” Tove Ditlevsen writes in the first volume of her Copenhagen Trilogy, Childhood. The first volumes of her memoirs were released in 1967, nine years before her death by suicide, yet they were released in English in full only in 2019. The Copenhagen Trilogy slices Ditlevsen’s life into three marking periods. Childhood establishes the author’s search for meaning while confronting the stigma of poverty, then Youth and Dependency voice a cry against entrapment. Ditlevsen longs for freedom, even as she oscillates between conforming to established norms and stepping away from them. Through marriage, motherhood, and addiction, she succumbs to “lamentation,” a word she admired as a child yearning to be normal—a time in life she describes as “dark” and “moaning.” Her lucid writing depicts the troubled nature of human relationships and an unapologetic life with commanding grace.
New York Review Books
Life and Fate, by Vasily Grossman (translated by Robert Chandler)
Grossman’s sweeping book Life and Fate illustrates the alienating nature of war in urgent, gripping, and elegant prose, providing an unmatched realist account of the 1942–43 Battle of Stalingrad. Completed in 1959 in the aftermath of de-Stalinization, Life and Fate’s cast of characters includes the Shaposhnikov and Shtrum families, as well as German and Soviet soldiers, intellectuals, and ordinary people. Their individual destinies are enmeshed in the survival of the city, and the Soviet protagonists are caught between defending their country and supporting its murderous regime. Despite hints of political openness at the close of the ’50s, Life and Fate’s denunciation of state-sanctioned atrocities crossed a line; the KGB seized Grossman’s material as he pitched the book to publishers. Friends smuggled a hidden microfilm copy of the manuscript to Switzerland, where the book was eventually published in 1980, then translated into English in 1985. The novel’s truth is derived from its author’s exceptional moral clarity. As a journalist, Grossman bore witness to unfathomable massacres and wrote early reports of Nazi crimes. Yet Grossman couldn’t save his mother from Berdychiv, Ukraine, where the Nazis killed her along with approximately 30,000 other Jews. When he briefly resurrects her memory in the book through a mother writing a chilling letter to her son, Viktor, a character largely based on Grossman, he reminds us that history and tragedy are never far away.
University of Michigan Press
Nimrod: Selected Writings, by Nimrod (translated by Dawn Cornelio, Catherine du Toit, Patrick Williamson, Emily Goedde, and Sylvie Kandé)
The Chad-born writer Nimrod has published more than 20 books in French since 1989 and has won the Édouard Glissant prize and the Apollinaire poetry prize, among other Francophone literary distinctions. The University of Michigan literature professor Frieda Ekotto curated Nimrod’s most evocative texts in 2018, making them available for the first time to an English-speaking audience. Through these essays, short stories, and poems, Nimrod explores whether the French language can ever embody emotion, cravings, or love beyond historical oppression in a post-colonial world. In his 2008 essay “The New French Matter,” Nimrod reclaims the language’s Africanness: “French does not rape my mother tongue,” he writes, dismissing the idea that it only erases identity. Nimrod thrives in exploring tricky and culturally charged paradoxes. To him, coexistence and cultural mélange are not just possible but desirable. He sees the galactic expanse of language as something “inaudible and mysterious,” transcending the fields of linguistics and politics—a quasi-spiritual experience. “Samuel Beckett reinvents himself when he writes in French,” he explains, arguing that language is a form of self. Nimrod further confronts the ethnic prejudices associated with the label Francophone, one mostly reserved in France for referring to writers of color from formerly colonized countries. In this omnibus volume, Nimrod stands up to defend multiculturalism, pluralities, and tolerance—a crucial voice at this time.
Daunt Books
Daunt Books
The Road to the Cityand The Dry Heart, by Natalia Ginzburg (translated by Frances Frenaye)
First translated from Italian a few years after their 1940s publications and recently republished in 2021, The Road to the City and The Dry Heart are tales of complex desire and female coming-of-age in two arcs, marriage and motherhood. In these connected novellas that have previously been published as a single volume, Ginzburg’s young protagonists yearn for meaning and reciprocal love. One gets pregnant out of wedlock; the other struggles to maintain a happy marriage with her emotionally avoidant husband. The city lures the former, while the latter lives a reclusive existence on its outskirts. Ginzburg, a literary voice who emerged in 1940s and ’50s Italy, explores the consequences of betrayals and asks whether women should demand more instead of settling. “Life runs away with us before we know what it’s all about,” one character in The Dry Heart says, and the protagonists’ challenges strengthen their resolve; they go from pleading for autonomy to demanding it. The protagonists languish in the shadow of the patriarchy before they start voicing their aspirations and dissatisfactions. Being a wife and being a parent are presented as life-grueling personal journeys that can cause symbolic—and physical—death. Social elevation is costly; while the women rely on maids and helpers to serve their daily needs, Ginzburg shows that her heroines’ status doesn’t exempt them from other forms of feminized labor, or other hardships.
Liveright
The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, by Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (translated by Margaret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson)
The late-19th-century Brazilian writer Machado de Assis was decisively ahead of his time when he reinterpreted the antihero in his novel The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Written in 1881 and translated into English in 1952, 1955, and 1997, with two new translations released in 2020, the book exudes modernity. Brás Cubas, a deceased character born in 1805 who never achieved grace or glory, reflects on his picaresque life, multiple failures, and equally numerous delusions. Across incisive, deliciously delirious short chapters, Machado de Assis deploys caustic humor to atone for Brás Cubas’s meanderings—including a failed political career and parting crushes and aborted loves (he divides a relationship into “consular” and “imperial” eras, like Napoleon’s biphasic reign). The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas introduced realism to Brazilian literature, in contrast with the prevailing Romantic nostalgia and lyricism of the time. Machado de Assis uses absurdity, self-deprecation, and satire to portray a rash, near-farcical narrator who, in many ways, doesn’t take himself seriously—which is unnerving for the people he encounters. Melancholia and optimism are two extremes he rejects; he accepts life’s joys and sorrows for what they are. “I have added a little petulant pessimism of my own. Why not? This is, after all, the work of a dead man,” he warns in his distinctive, mischievous voice from beyond the grave.
Astra Publishing House
The Artisans: A Vanishing Chinese Village, by Shen Fuyu (translated by Jeremy Tiang)
Shen Fuyu’s love for his 600-year-old home village, in southeast China, is as expansive as his drive to preserve family memories. It’s an urgent task for the Paris-based author of more than a dozen other books, because his village’s way of life is painfully dissolving. Each time he returns, he notices that more houses have fallen into disrepair, and that the village is being overhauled at an unsettling pace. And in this swift transition, artisans represent a vanishing class. Sketching a sociological and emotional portrait of a place over an entire century, Shen Fuyu reminiscences about his grandfather, the town carpenter, as well as the bamboo weaver’s infatuation with a bull, the bricklayer’s Christian proselytizing to the village, and the tofu maker’s lessons on meal etiquette. His personal anecdotes meet history as lives in the town are affected by the Japanese occupation and the policies of the Great Leap Forward. “Where I come from, people speak in loud voices with thick country accents, and their behavior is coarse,” he says; it’s a starting point that challenges one-dimensional narratives and centers rich, human stories. In The Artisans, originally released in 2015 and first translated from Chinese into English in 2022, the writer grieves a real-yet-idealized locale. His prose is steeped in contagious nostalgia, and he employs the universal language of emigration and exile, writing, “I am now an orphan, lost in the big city.”
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